For decades, sewage from the Tijuana River has poisoned San Diego’s coastline, closed beaches from the border to Coronado, sickened Navy SEALs training in our own country’s waters and even forced families to remain indoors on many beautiful San Diego days.
Tijuana, and the attendant pollution, have grown exponentially since 2016. Each year’s pleas bring the same response from Washington and Mexico City: more studies, more “minutes,” more piecemeal funding. We are left to pay the price while two federal governments continue to treat a public health, economic and environmental crisis as an afterthought.
But we no longer have to wait. No one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves. That is why Measure B is on the ballot, and why you should vote “yes” on B.
Sure, there’s been slow movement. Since 2022, the U.S. and Mexico have signed diplomatic “minutes” directing $474 million toward treatment-plant expansion and pipe repairs on the Tijuana side of the border. That funding is decades overdue and should not be mistaken for anything close to sufficient. Washington addressed the part of this crisis it could resolve with a press release. Tijuana’s projected population growth and cross-border commerce dwarf what is allocated to clean its wastewater.
The most honorable private citizens here have effectively been doing the government’s job for years. The Prebys Foundation got the first data collection started with Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientists to prove the dangers of this pollution. In October 2025, the San Diego Foundation committed over $650,000 to Tijuana River watershed projects, including water-quality monitoring and a binational hydrological model. Nonprofits and philanthropists have carried costs that belong on a federal ledger, at a fraction of the necessary funding.
The stakes keep rising, and not only at the river. The county faces an estimated $300 million budget shortfall, compounded by threatened federal cuts to healthcare, childcare and food assistance — even as Tijuana’s growing population and manufacturing base strain a wastewater system never built for this load, as climate change drives more violent storms through the valley each year.
The Colorado River water source approaches its own reckoning. Interim guidelines expire at the end of 2026, resting on a century-old compact whose flow assumptions climate change has made obsolete. Facing water scarcity and a collapsing federal budget all at once, there is no outside authority coming to solve our problem for us.
Measure B — the San Diego County Health & Safety Act on the ballot this November — will jump-start the solution. It raises the countywide sales tax by half a cent, from 7.75% to 8.25%, generating an estimated $400 million to $450 million annually, per the San Diego Foundation’s voter education project.
Of that, 22.5% is dedicated to Tijuana River sewage cleanup. Officials estimate the river-cleanup share alone could support bonding of up to $1.2 billion, enabling our own potential tertiary treatment and water reuse. No federal treaty can offer us what this measure does: a funding source the county controls and directs on its own timeline, accountable to its own voters through yearly audits.
As per their creed, the San Diego County Taxpayers Association opposes Measure B, arguing Mexico and the federal government should bear more of this cost and that existing funds should be reallocated first. That posture has gotten us nowhere for decades. Mexico is the pollution source, but it is a sovereign nation whose money we don’t get to spend. We need to stop fixing the blame, and start fixing the problem.
Most of us recoil in horror at any mention of more taxes, but here’s the math: a half-cent increase is just 20 cents on a $40 purchase. Doing nothing is far more expensive: our poisoned beaches, declining property values, and loss of tourist revenue in Coronado, Imperial Beach, and the South Bay are already costlier than Measure B. This sewage crisis drags the entire region’s tourism down with it. Add documented illness tied to sewage exposure, and a county budget already $300 million short before federal cuts, and you begin to see the cost of inaction. Measure B is how we take control of the solution now.
Washington and Mexico City have consistently shown that they will pay lip service and little more, but it’s our air, our closed beaches, our poisoned water, our strained health clinics and our communities that are at physical and economic risk. As Americans, we pride ourselves on our innovation and self-sufficiency. Measure B will start the process of floating bonds to pay for river diversion and deliver the lasting engineering remedy for our sewage crisis.
We can save ourselves. But it requires that you vote “yes” on Measure B.
Laura Wilkinson Sinton is the CEO of StopTheSewage.org, and a founding member of both the South Bay Health Task Force formerly led by Supervisor Paloma Aguirre, and the Tijuana River Coalition of over 60 NGO’s working on actionable solutions to the cross-border pollution crisis. She holds a masters of sustainability leadership from Arizona State University’s College of Global Futures and lives in Coronado.
